Local child advocate retires: Wenonah librarian says goodbye after more than 20 years

Jean Morgan is more than just a staff member at Wenonah Elementary School.
A librarian at the Waynesboro school for more than 20 years and an educator for 39, Morgan makes it a point to read to all grade levels and raises money each year through a book fair so that each Wenonah child has two books to take home.
She also helps pack backpacks with food for children each week as part of a Blue Ridge Area Food Bank program.
“There is nothing I’ve gone to Jean and asked her to do that she hasn’t done,” said Wenonah Principal Karen Weaver. “She is willing to help any child or staff member.”
With classes set to end for summer, Morgan is retiring, leaving behind her second family at Wenonah. Morgan will step away from her full-time duties at Wenonah after today.
“I do love the children and working with the children. These kids are special,” said Morgan.
One of her great pleasures, she said, is seeing a 6-year-old confidently read two years after the child was afraid to open a book.
Raised in a military family, Morgan spent much of her youth in Hampton Roads, but said she emerged from her shell as a high school student when the family moved to the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba in the early 1960s, just after the Bay of Pigs crisis.
“We did everything together, all the social activities,” said Morgan of the class of 35 with whom she graduated from high school at Guantanamo.
She said her confidence grew in Cuba to the point where she participated in power puff football, something she would never have had the courage to do in Virginia.
But that self-assurance vanished when Morgan entered then Madison College in Harrisonburg in the mid 1960s. She was away from her family for the first time, and knew she had to heed her parents’ admonition to get a college degree.
“There was no cell phone or e-mail,” said Morgan, who weathered her loneliness by developing close friendships with other girls on her dorm hall.
Encouraged by her family to be a teacher, Morgan taught kindergarten and elementary grades before going back to school to get her master’s degree in library science.
Since becoming a librarian, Morgan has sought to help children learn how to read so they can understand subject matter as they progress in school.
While Morgan said she “hopes she has instilled the [children’s] interest in hearing a story,” Weaver said she did more.
“She is a huge asset,” Weaver said. “She knows what the classroom teachers need.”
The principal said Morgan coordinates the books teachers need when certain units are being studied.
Morgan has been gratified by the progress Wenonah kids have made on accountability testing, particularly the Virginia Standards of Learning.
But she wonders if the pressures of both the SOLs and the federal No Child Left Behind Act aren’t taking their toll on teaching careers.
“Teachers are being pressured so much, I think it will be very rare for them to stay as long as me. It’s so hard and draining,” Morgan said of the accountability expectations.
Morgan now will spend time rooting for the University of Virginia and New York Yankees, and working backstage for the local theater group, The Waynesboro Players.
She will also continue to help Appalachian Trail hikers through her church, Grace Lutheran, and will keep assisting the English as a Second Language program at First Baptist Church.
Morgan said her mother, born and raised in New York’s Bronx borough, helped inspire her.
“She was a housewife who instilled my love for children and caring for other people,” Morgan said.
A retired Wenonah teacher, Andi Shifflett, said of her friend: “She is an advocate for children and has touched the lives of many in her community and beyond. Her manner is quiet and gentle, but her impact has been huge. She has brought her enthusiasm for life into everything she does.”